Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
-Neil Gaiman on Coraline
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.
Sometimes. Other times you have small anxious children who really, really don’t want anything upsetting or traumatic in their stories. Those do exist; I was one. The whole thing about “children don’t want soft stories, children want gore and horror and decapitated barbies” may apply to a majority of children, but not all of them. :P
#i also went hoppity-skip of my own volition #i am not and was not a Real Child #still kind of sensitive about that #i was easily frightened and easily traumatized #and the only people who seem to acknowledge that possibility at all #are like Think Of The Children conservative activists and helicopter parents #idk if i have a point here #i just get a little tetchy about Real Children
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Oh god, same.
The person right before you in the chain says “The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong”, and while there’s a important harm *reduction* in that, also very important is “so they need a universe where things *aren’t* threatening for a change”.
This world is one *so* thoroughly threatening that even its *sitcoms* contain shapeshifting monsters that camouflage themselves as normal parts of the environment, and plagues that drive you insane and which can infect you through a phone call. A world where cars have stickers constantly reminding you of the terrible things that can happen to you in them, and every grocery store has a random chance of triggering you, re-rolled every four minutes (and you don’t have enough autonomy to even *attempt* to do anything to counteract it).
Why the fuck *wouldn’t* you want a break from that hellscape?
I did read Coraline as a kid, and I don’t think I found it *especially* horrifying, but “not especially horrifying” is *not* *saying* much at that age.
(I continue to be very glad that I did not read Animorphs.)
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(Although, re: decapitated Barbies specifically, I *did* play barber-surgeon† with my stuffed animals. This somehow did not stop me from being what I think was the expected level of horrified by those bits of Toy Story; it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realised I was Sid.)
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There’s *some* ways in which I rolled with it more as a kid (for example, my inclination towards fluff is actually *stronger* now), but I think that’s…sort of a learned-helplessness kind of thing? When horror is everywhere, there’s nothing you can do *but* take it.
(related: the thing where younger!me was into (what I would now recognise as) erotic horror because *that was all there was*; my tastes shifted heavily towards fluffy consentful stuff pretty much as soon as there was fluffy consentful stuff to be had)
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I wonder if this relates to the assumption between adults that everyone’s masochistic.
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†I don’t think I ever actually called it that, but I figure that term gives you a good idea of the sort of things involved.
Tags:
#the last time I walked into a grocery store and they started playing That Song #I walked right back out and listened to Florence and the Machine on my smartphone while I waited for them to be done #(and it *still* sucked just not as much) #ten-year-old me did not have that option #reply via reblog #long post #amnesia cw #ageism #nsfw text? #death mention #illness mention #my childhood
Brinens and Things 
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